no title

Killers Among Us

8 years later, arson that killed 2 boys still haunts family

As Christmas neared, someone torched a farmhouse with 5 kids inside, taking the lives of two brothers who were as close as twins

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoJonathan Quilter | DispatchAfter losing her two sons, 9-year-old B.J. and 8-year-old Brett, in a fire on Dec. 8, 2004, Deb Channell had their faces tattooed on her right calf. Deb was able to escape the burning house with three of her children, but the boys were still inside. The arson remains unsolved.

Channell brothers B.J., 9, above, and Brett, 8, were inseparable and often mistaken for twins.

More Articles

RICHWOOD, Ohio — Whoever sneaked behind the dilapidated old farmhouse under cover of darkness
had to know that someone was home.

The glow of the television, playing cartoons even at 2 a.m. because the 3-year-old couldn’t
sleep without them, seeped through the first-floor windows. The house was just a few steps from the
road, and Deb Channell’s van was parked out front.

With Christmas less than three weeks away, the artificial tree in a corner of the living room
was alight.

Yet someone crept up, poured an accelerant around the back porch and on the straw bales that
served as insulation, and set the whole thing ablaze.

Deb and three of her children broke through a window and made it out, their lungs full of smoke,
their bodies cut. Two others remained inside.

William “B.J.” Channell, 9, and his younger brother, 8-year-old Brett, had been in the same
upstairs bedroom.

“I tried to go back ... I couldn’t make it,” Deb recalls.

From the lawn, she screamed for her boys. She fought to get closer, but the old wooden house was
a tinderbox. Flames soon licked the siding from every window, and fire shot through the roof.
Helpless, she only could stand and watch as crews tried in vain to save her sons.

Her husband, Bill Channell, was living in Florida then and took the middle-of-the-night phone
call that two of his children were gone.

Life had never been easy for the Channell family, but 2004 had been particularly difficult. The
family had left their Plain City home for Florida, but it hadn’t worked out. So along about
November, Deb left her husband, loaded the kids into her van and drove home to Ohio.

A friend suggested that she contact a former co-worker. Ed Norris, Deb was told, was living at
his parents’ old place in Union County, and although it wasn’t much, the home was big, and he
probably could put the family up for a time.

That was how Deb and the kids — Brett and B.J., 12-year-old Tommy Smith, 10-year-old Matt
Channell and Debbie “Sissy” Channell, who was almost 4 — ended up at 10510 Fulton Creek Rd. They
had moved in just after Thanksgiving.

The place was a mess. The property was littered with junk. The house had no heat, the basement
was full of water, and there were no smoke detectors. Someone had even complained to the county’s
children’s services agency just five days before the fire that perhaps no one should be living
there.

Ed said he was doing the best he could. And Deb was grateful. “I’d come back with nothing but
the clothes on our backs,” she said. “Ed was nice to me and good to the kids. I wasn’t planning on
being there forever.”

Ed worked the overnight shift at the Scotts Co. chemical plant, so Deb and the children mostly
had the place to themselves.

As she tells it now: “The kids were happy.”

In the early hours of Dec. 8, 2004, Deb and Sissy were asleep on a daybed in a downstairs living
room, and the four boys were sleeping in two rooms upstairs.

The stories of who awoke when and how are muddled, lost in the chaos of the night. But not long
before 2 a.m., Sissy’s cries awoke Deb. She could barely see through the smoke. There were flames
in the kitchen, on the back porch.

She couldn’t get to the phone and had no way to the door they usually used. Yelling for her boys
to come downstairs and cradling her daughter on a hip, she tried a never-used front door, but it
was nailed shut and boarded over with plywood. So she punched her way through glass, and she, her
daughter and Tommy and Matt, who had run down the stairs, climbed out.

Why Brett and B.J. didn’t run with the others is a mystery. Union County Deputy Sheriff Kevin
Weller, who investigated the case, said perhaps the two youngest boys already had been overcome by
smoke. They were the smallest of the boys, and their bedroom was closest to where the fire started.
Or maybe they’d just been too frightened to move.

Once outside, Tommy ran for help. Half-clothed, barefoot and bleeding, the 12-year-old raced
through the unfamiliar countryside in search of someone who could save his brothers. It took him
two stops on that desolate road before he awoke a neighbor, who called 911.

“I thought for a long time, ‘What if I hadn’t offered them a place to stay, would they have been
someplace else? Would they have been better off?’ ” said Ed, who still lives in a camper on the
property and only recently demolished the house. “And you wonder: How cheap would it have been to
have a smoke detector in every room?”

People often mistook B.J. and Brett for twins. The boys looked a lot alike, yes, but it was
their closeness that generally led to the assumption.

As the family’s pastor later told investigators, “Where there was one, there was always the
other.”

Brett was the class clown. He used to tell his teachers they should be monkeys because they
always ate bananas. He loved bubble gum and, his mother recalls with a laugh, he loved to clean. He
would scrub toilets without being asked.

He also was a fighter, tough like his truck-driving dad. Bill says his boy never lost a
scrap.

B.J., on the other hand, now “he loved the girls,” his dad said with a sly smile. One from
church had even written him a love letter. He was a daredevil, an artist, and he never passed up a
bowl of chicken-flavored ramen noodles. He always wrote his B’s backward.

The boys shared a love of mischief, baseball — both were decent outfielders — the outdoors,
their baby sister and each other.

Bill, who returned home to Plain City after the fire, said he just can’t recall a time when the
boys wanted to be apart: “I hate to say this, but I’m glad that when it happened, they both went
together.”

After the fire, investigators tracked down an ex-girlfriend of Norris’ who had made prank calls
to the house. They questioned a neighbor who had an old beef with the family. They considered a man
who had been setting fires on Columbus’ West Side. A criminal profiler was consulted. Several
people, including Ed Norris and Bill and Deb Channell, took polygraphs.

All dead ends.

“I’ve racked my brain, thinking and thinking, what else could I have done? Was there something I
missed?” Deputy Weller said. “I can’t even imagine what the Channell family is going through. You
can see it in their eyes, especially Bill. Total sadness and grief and ‘Why?’ That’s why it’s
important to solve this. I want justice for that family.”

Until that day comes, Bill and Deb focus on the children they have left. Although divorced now,
the two remain friends. Deb has another son now, a 5-year-old named Cheyenne.

Tommy will be 20 this month and loves to repair cars. Matt just turned 18 and studies video-game
design in vocational school. Sissy is 11 and never stops talking.

But none of them ever speaks of the fire.

As for Deb? She sleeps in her clothes, fearing the moment she might need to run. Her Grove City
home has a smoke detector in every room.

She says she would trade her life for her children’s if she could.

After the fire, she pulled Brett’s and B.J.’s Christmas stockings from the rubble. She still
hangs them every Christmas.

Then she takes a moment to herself. And she sobs.

Central Ohio Crime Stoppers is offering up to $5,000 for information leading to an arrest and
conviction in this case. Tips can be submitted anonymously online at
www.stopcrime.org, or by calling Crime
Stoppers at 614-461-8477 or toll-free at 1-877-645-8477. Information also can be directed to the
Union County sheriff’s office at 937-642-6753.